Gas Prices Peaking Early; Businesses Trying to Find Alternatives

LANSING (WILX)-- Have you noticed gas again creeping toward four-dollars? Delivery businesses sure have, and there's a very big delivery day just a week-and-a-half away. When gas prices climb, some businesses are forced to pass the extra cost onto customers but that is exactly what the family owned business Bancroft Flowers is trying to avoid. Instead they bought an energy efficient vehicle in hopes that it will keep them from raising delivery cost for at least another year.

"We want to try to find another option of not increasing the fee to go over to our customer. One of the options was to get our insurance policies and look at the vehicles we were driving and gas milage," said Bancroft Flowers Business Executive Jacob Leyrer.

Valentines day means means a lot of driving for businesses like Bancroft, so they spend money to save money.

"We invested in a system that maps it out for us to come up with the best strategy to minimize time and cost," said Leyrer.

The price at the pump maybe outrageous, but it's not the price at the pump has the President of the Michigan Petroleum Association concerned, it's the fact that they have jumped so much in so little time that has him trying to figure out why.

"We havent seen an increase in demand and we haven't seen a decrease in supply they only thing I can tie this to is speculators have driven up the price of refined gasoline," said MPA President Mark Griffin.

Griffin says the price increase is typical for this time of year and usually peaks around May or June, but this year it's already getting close to what he thought would be the peak. He says the quick rise in prices make them even more unpredictable.

"It could go down tomorrow . It's going to depend on the speculators if they've driven it up this quickly they may reach a point to sell off and start making a profit earlier than they have done in the past,"

Since the beginning of the year gas prices have gone up more than 40 cents a gallon. Petroleum Analysts believe gas prices will go over $4 dollars a gallon again this year.

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